In describing how her lengthy and distinguished career began, veteran actor-singer Mimi Hines giggles with a childlike sense of mischief. "When I was 2 years old, I used to sing songs like 'Chattanooga Choo Choo,'" she begins. And I especially loved 'Rosalie,' a Nelson Eddy song." She stops to sing ...

Having a conversation with Baz Luhrmann is a bit like watching one of his flamboyantly colored, rhythmically edited films—it's exhilarating. He talks quickly, leaps nimbly from topic to topic, and indeed seems to be bursting with more ideas than he can communicate. The 41-year-old Australian director has channeled ...

Those famous pauses; the mystery-and-menace quotient; the edgy, comic tone; the musical everyday language; the characters' erratic behavior—acting in the plays of Harold Pinter is a challenge. (Americans have the additional unavoidable burden of the British accents.)

It's been exactly a month since the world as we know it changed. Among theatre folks, our colleagues in New York are suffering the most from the fallout of Sept. 11, being so physically close to the tragedy and in many cases losing their jobs (if not their friends ...

Great actors bring all of themselves to any role. In the case of Helen Mirren, that's a lot—decades of both wild living and sedate gardening, and a dizzyingly diverse career, from Shakespeare to soft porn, from itinerant avant-garde theatre to the BBC detective thriller she's still best ...